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WTO protest success

The Doha conference, which is the 6th WTO ministerial conference had four agenda: the rich countries hoped to come up with agreements on non-agriculture market access (Nama) and services; while poor nations pushed for special treatment as bargaining tool against the demand of rich nations to relax tariff barriers. There was a stalemate even among rich nations on the issue on agricultural export subsidy while the general agreements on trade and services essentially failed.

Negotiations bogged down when the feuding parties from developed countries ended without a final date on when to end agricultural export subsidies. Rich-poor tensions have plagued Doha all week. The European Union had offered 2013 as cut-off date for farm export subsidies while the US wanted it in 2010. Reports had it that most agreed on 2013 but Brazil disagreed.

The Doha talks started four years ago in Qatar and the Hong Kong round was expected to be the last before the deals close next year.

The Cordillerans were among 150 Bayan (Nationalist Alliance) delegates to the International League of People’s Struggles (ILPS) forum , which is just one block of the organized protesters.

“It was a victory for anti-WTO peoples of the world,” Windel Bolinget, secretary-general of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (CPA) said in a press conference. Bolinget led the six-person delegation to Hong Kong, which included Innabuyog-Gabriela secretary-general Vernie Yocogan-Diano, Virgie Dammay and Julian Gayumba of Apit Tako (alliance of peasants in the Cordillera homeland), Flora Belinan of Migrante-Cordillera and Anthony Karl Riva of Anakbayan-Metro Baguio.

The pressure outside the convention center was even stronger, Diano told reporters. She said, the protests were everywhere in Hong Kong where thousands of protesters stages rallies, noise barrages, die-ins and all sorts of attention-getting activities that attracted the Hong Kong media.

“Before the negotiations collapsed and declared ended on December 18, more than 10,000 protesters were already in Hong Kong streets, chanting, shouting and burning effigies,” Bolinget told Nordis. The protesters came from all corners of the globe, another Hong Kong-based columnist wrote. Bolinget said there were representatives from developed countries such as Belgium, The Netherlands and Turkey in Europe, New Zealand and the United States, but most came from underdeveloped and developing countries such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Bangladesh, India and the Philippines.

Women’s protests tagged by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post as “purple march” called the “WTO as the most insidious instrument of capitalism and globalization”. The Hong Kong paper said the march was peaceful but some protesters tried to break through police barriers and successfully submitted a petition to the conference.

Diano said the weeklong protests was characterized by police brutality, more than 1000 mostly Koreans landing in jail. Hong Kong police even used pepper bullets and pepper spray against the protesters, Diano observed.

Filipino migrant workers in Hong Kong joined the Philippine group during the protests, according to Migrante’s Belinan. They also mobilized support for their compatriots by soliciting foodstuff for the protesters.

In a statement distributed to the Hong Kong public, Cordillera migrant workers demanded the Philippine government to withdraw from WTO, which they called a “global regime that only resulted to further poverty and hunger, forced migration and slavery. They also called on GMA to step down, “having allowed the plunder of our resources in the Cordillera, having abandoned many Filipino migrant workers,” the Cordillera migrant statement said.

While the 150-nation WTO MC6 was on going, an alternative conference on trade and war was being held simultaneously in the same place by the ILPS, an anti-imperialist international alliance. The Philippine’s Luis Jalandoni graced the said forum, which also gathered thousands from Southeast Asian and Pacific nations like Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Korea, India and the Philippines, among others.

The developing countries account for 70% of the world’s rural population.

Another forum, the International Caucus on Mining and WTO, gathered indigenous peoples and environmental activists who condemned the WTO MC6 for further liberalizing local industries and controlling the world’s mineral resources.

Party list representatives Satur Ocampo, (Bayan Muna), Teddy Casiño (Bayan Muna) and Liza Maza (Gabriela) staged their own protests inside the WTO convention center as they stood up in the middle of WTO President Pascal Lamy’s speech at the opening of the 6th ministerial conference (MC6).

According to Bolinget, the party list representatives blocked the passing of the Doha declaration as they listened to the people’s sentiments outside of the convention center. Nothing was heard from the official Philippine panel to the convention, Bolinget said, as it was so embarrassing for any one to speak in favor of the WTO amid the reverberating protests outside.

It was Ocampo who sought for a moratorium on negotiations and the suspension or abrogation of WTO agreements pending a comprehensive review of the accord’s 10-year damage on ailing economies.

As the MC6 closed in the evening of December 18, the South China Morning Post said, “low expectations were barely exceeded, but the summit provided just enough momentum to advance the Doha Development Agenda as it enters its final year of negotiations”.

“Trade ministers left hard decisions on agriculture, industrial goods and services for the New Year, giving themselves a deadline of April 30 to fill in the still considerable blanks left from Hong Kong,” the Hong Kong daily said.

For the farmers, the collapse of the Doha Round must have been a result of protests against liberalized agriculture. Apit Tako’s Dammay said the death of two among thousands of Korean farmers in the Hong Kong protests must awaken governments to get WTO out of agriculture. More than 1000 Korean farmers were apprehended and jailed by Hong Kong police as the MC6 progressed, Dammay said.

“In the Cordillera, farmers are slowly dying because our markets are getting flooded with cheaper imported vegetables,” Bolinget added.

The group presented clippings from Hong Kong newspapers that carried large pictures of the protests, among them were pictures of Cordillerans playing the gongs and in one published photo Diano was holding a microphone leading the anti-WTO chanting. # Lyn V. Ramo for NORDIS

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